Rice team achieves a cancer milestone

Updated 11:58 pm, Thursday, November 1, 2012

A potentially revolutionary approach to treating cancer has taken another step toward regular use in patients.

The nanoshell-based technology developed in Houston, which allows physicians to essentially burn away tumors, should be tested in more than two dozen patients during the next few months.

The trial of patients with primary and metastatic cancerous tumors in the lung will occur in Cancer Treatment Centers of America hospitals, which has facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Tulsa.

It's a substantial breakthrough for the Rice University scientists, Naomi Halas and Jennifer West, who developed the nanoshell technology more than a decade ago and whose company, Nanospectra Biosciences, has been preparing it for use in patients.

For Halas and West, it's been a long wait.

"People have contacted me literally from their hospital beds, and it's been heartbreaking because things do not move faster," Halas said.

Scientists have understood since the 1950s that coating a tiny particle with a metal shell would have some pretty nifty light-bending properties.

But until Halas, a chemical engineer, came along, the difficulty was in actually making the particles because they're so small, just a few billionths of a meter.

But the emerging science of nanotechnology allowed scientists to build tiny things at the nanoscale. Halas and her group developed a process by which they coated tiny glass particles with gold, which allowed them to absorb infrared light and heat up.

Working with West, a bioengineer, Halas made initial tests showing nanoshells were also the right size to collect in tumors but not healthy tissue, when injected intravenously. Using an infrared light source, the scientists could destroy tumors while leaving healthy tissue intact.

Thursday's announcement of the lung cancer trial follows a smaller, ongoing test at several Texas facilities, of head-and-neck cancer patients.

But it's expected the lung trial, because there is a larger pool of lung cancer patients and Cancer Treatment Centers of America is eager to move forward, will proceed more quickly.

"The use of heat to destroy malignant tumors is not new to cancer care, but this technology holds the promise of offering new and exciting treatment options for tumor destruction with minimal collateral damage to adjacent tissue and structures," said Dr. Mark Lund, who will lead the trial for Cancer Treatment Centers of America.

It has taken about a decade to show nanoshells will accumulate in tumors, but not healthy blood vessels, and that they are not toxic.

Now the first tests in humans will begin to see if they're effective. Halas said the results are positive.

"I am very optimistic," she said. "We're seeing that safety is not an issue, and efficacy is very positive. If anything I am more than excited than in previous years. It's fabulous to see this on the threshold of helping a lot of people."